TPF : Deity as Desk Clerk

[Gnomon]

The 'Hotel Manager' Indictment
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/984441

One of the most frequently raised objections to religious belief in the modern world is the Problem of Evil. The argument is simple and emotionally powerful: if God is all-powerful and all-good, then why does He allow terrible suffering?

This definition of deity may be peculiar to the Catholic rendition of Judaism. The God of the Hebrews was indeed all-powerful, by contrast to pagan idols, but his goodness was conditional : if you don't Love & Fear & Obey God, you will suffer. The Creation was described as Good, but its imperfections were blamed on the species of sentient-yet-gullible creatures that were supposed to “manage” the Garden. Ironically, the Hebrews, as the Chosen People, accepted that blame, on behalf of all humanity, as inscrutable divine Justice.

Catholics inherited the Good God as a given, then spawned a corps of Scholars charged with finding reasons to reconcile Omnibenevolence with both natural and cultural Evil. As usual, the blame is placed on the creatures, not the creator. Except that the machinations of a subordinate Evil God were postulated as a way to test human faithfulness & love for the Good God, which presumably makes up for their innate credulity. Yet, if God is indeed Omnipotent, then the "buck" of suffering stops at the top. Not the desk clerk, but the CEO.

The moment there is matter, there is entropy.

Contrary to Catholicism, my philosophical god-concept is closer to that of Spinoza and Whitehead*1. Whitehead defined his God, not as an ideal of perfection, but as the potential for creation and change. Specifically, his god functions as a “principle of concrescence” : the act or process of coming or growing together; coalescence . And that is one way of describing Natural Evolution : incremental & progressive occasions of form change.

The Big Bang was a cosmic explosion of Energy, followed by ongoing expansion & Entropy. If that was all there was, then eventual Heat Death would result in the snuffing-out of the Cosmic flame. But mutual gravity causes concretion, as Energy becomes Mass, and Mass becomes stars & planets. Evolution is an elaboration and extension of the process of coalescence. And, historically, it has a direction : from the simplicity of a Singularity, to Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful"*2.

Philosophically, we can think of Energy as positive, and Entropy as negative. Then, in terms of human emotions, Positive change is Good, while Negative change is Evil. For sentient creatures, Evil results in suffering. But, as far as we know, natural Energy has no agenda for the survival or thrival of humans. Yet, if Evolution --- as exemplified on Earth --- is indeed moving inexorably toward complexity, then the human brain may be the current apex of material concrescence.

The physical brain's non-physical (immaterial) function, Consciousness, may also be the emergence of a novel form of causal Energy. The homo sapiens brain produces something undreamed of 14B years ago : knowledge and self-awareness. So, Whitehead's impersonal Principle seems to have set our universe on a course that we humans are unable to predict. But some of us may look upon the process of Evolution, and say that it is both Good and Bad, depending on your viewpoint. One way to look at it is to admit that the Cosmos is improving*2 but not yet perfect.


*1. PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ur-time/p1

*2. Misconceptions about evolution :
Evolution results in progress; organisms are always getting better through evolution.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu › teach-evolution › misco...
Note --- Adaptation means improve or die

[Gnomon]

But if we take God out of the mix, we still have nature; what does that make of the use of death and pain as the engine of survival in nature (the physics of it)? The world is still as it is, with it's pain and death.

Exactly! Arguing about the goodness or badness of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God does not solve the humanistic problem of Evil & Suffering. It merely assigns blame to the mythical Manager, who is ironically assumed to be absent from his post. A more philosophical position would be to recognize that the world (i.e. Nature) "uses" pain & death (sentience & senescence) as integral components in the constructive process of Evolution, from a mathematical quantum-scale Singularity to a near-infinite & ever-expanding Cosmos of Consciousness. On one Pale Blue Dot, we humans somehow became sentient, and invented the categories of Good & Evil, so we'll have something to philosophize about.

Non-theistic pre-Christian philosophies --- Brahmanism, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism --- accepted the world "as it is", and charged humans with the responsibility for adapting to that reality. The various gods of Theism serve mainly as someone to complain to (e.g. the management). But secular history records no instances of divine interventions into the course of Nature, on behalf of whining humans. Yet, we have myths saying that the gods fixed the problem by evicting the troublesome tenants with floods & massacres. Obviously, the goal of evolution is not you or me. So we are merely means to some other end. Meanwhile, we philosophize.

That's why I prefer A.N. Whitehead's notion of God (Nature) as the inexorable Process of Evolution. The Darwinian Procedure works like a program*1, via And/Or/Not (selection & combination & elimination), to improve the current stock for the next generation. Like Spinoza, Whitehead uses the term "god" in a technical, not religious, sense to designate the implicit Programmer of this ongoing process of cosmic Creation. So, God is still in "the mix", not as the intervening manager, but as the program and/or programmer of the creative system we call "Evolution" or "Nature". The manager is not at the front desk, but at the cosmic computer console.


*1. Evolutionary programming (EP) is an approach to simulated evolution that iteratively generates increasingly appropriate solutions in the light of a stationary or nonstationary environment and desired fitness function.
https://link.springer.com/referencework ... 92910-9_23